Nano-composite silicon powders have been produced at a maximum process throughput of 6 g/min by plasma spraying with metallurgical grade silicon powder as raw material. The obtained powders are found to be fundamentally composed of crystalline silicon particles of 20-40 nm in diameter, and are coated with an $5-nm-thick amorphous carbonous layer when methane gas is additionally introduced during plasma spraying. The performance of half-cell batteries containing the powders as negative electrodes has shown that the capacity decay observed for the raw Si coarse particles is significantly improved by plasma treatment. The carbonous coating potentially contributes to an improvement in capacity retention, although coexisting SiC particles that inevitably form during high-temperature processing reduce the overall capacity. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.

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Si–Ni composite nanoparticles have been produced by a single and continuous plasma spray physical vapor deposition (PS-PVD) from Si and Ni powder feedstocks and their electrochemical performances as anode in lithium-ion batteries (LiB) are investigated. Si nanoparticles with 20–40 nm on which Ni is directly attached with Si/NiSi2 epitaxial interface are formed spontaneously through co-condensation of high temperature elemental gas mixtures during PS-PVD. When only a little amount of Ni is added to Si, the effect of the epitaxial Ni attachment on the Si nanoparticles becomes evident; the cycle capacity is appreciably improved to reach a 1.6 times higher capacity than that of the Si only cell after 50 cycles, due to reduced charge-transfer resistance and nanosized Si particle. In contrast, excessive Ni addition to Si feedstock leads to formation of various silicides as a result of the accelerated silicidation during PS-PVD, which results in a significant decrease in the cycle capacity due to reduction of the active Si phase amount despite reduced charge-transfer resistance.

Nanostructured Si-Ni composite powders were produced by plasma spraying and the electrochemical performance of the cells with these composites as negative electrode of the lithium-ion battery was tested. The cell with the powders produced at high power and high pressure exhibits higher capacities than that at the low power condition and attains 1849 mAh/g after 20 cycles. The difference in these powder characteristics suggests that the improvement of the capacity is associated with the increased amount of the incongruent NiSi 2 phase that is heterogeneously nucleated on the Si nanoparticles directly.